[tralmek]

I have a Fargo Persona C30e for printing ID cards for my employees. I've been running it on a Windows XP machine, but I'm upgrading all of our PCs to Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, and there are no drivers that will work for it with that setup, not even hacky ones. I'd like to run it with one of our MacBook Pros, but can't find any drivers for that either. I've been eying the "generic" drivers, but am kind of afraid to touch them since I don't know what they're for exactly.... I'm relatively new to OSX, so I'm still trying to figure things like this out. Has anyone gotten one of these printers to work, or know of some way to do so? I appreciate any help or suggestions, thanks!

I'd like to run it with a uMBP purchased new in November 09, running 10.6.4.

[Thorzdad]

There don't appear to be Mac drivers for any Fargo card printer. You could always run WinXP or Vista using BootCamp and run the card printer that way.
Have you contacted Fargo and asked if they had Mac drivers/software?

[Big Mac]

Yeah, I don't think there's any ID card printer manufacturer that has decent Mac support. There was one company with experimental drivers, but even if you have the drivers it's kind of a biatch if you don't also have ID card software (and that certainly doesn't exist in Mac land unfortunately, AFAIK).

You could just keep one Windows 7 32-bit installation for ID card printing, or you could dual boot. Are you really sure you actually need Windows 7 64-bit installed everywhere? We have two Penryn MBPs and one with Boot Camp Win 7 32 and the other with Win 7 64, and I can't detect much of any difference (other than slightly worse compatibility with older software on the 64-bit install, obviously).

[tralmek]

We're a photo and video production company using the Adobe products which support 64bit, and the extra RAM afforded by 64 is incredibly useful to us. Currently I do have a dual boot machine W7/XP, but I used a linux tool to allow me to repartition the drive without having to format it. The way I did it causes some periodic crashes so I've been looking forward to doing a clean wipe and just ridding myself of XP altogether. It's starting to look like that's not going to be an option.

I am already running dual boot on the MBP I use most, and I did W7 64 on that. I was intending to put W7 64 on all of my employees' MBPs who need Windows.

So right now it's looking like my best option will be to either do a bootcamp install of XP on a MBP or do a full reformat and repartition, then dual boot install of W7 and XP on the PC I mentioned above.

[Big Mac]

Oh, you could also see if Win 7 32 works in virtualization for your needs.

[tralmek]

I'd discounted running a W7 32 bit installation, but now that I'm actually thinking about it, I recall we have a machine that we pulled out of the office. It wouldn't handle a 64 bit OS and we were moving to all 64-bit. But it's the machine we tested W7 on to decide if it was worth the upgrade. I can pull it out of storage and see if that will play nice with the card printer. I know there are some people who had success running the Vista driver in W7 x86. Thanks for jogging my memory!

I appreciate all the helpful suggestions I got here, you guys are great.